Great Flood of 1927

A photograph of a boat with barber chair in Melville Louisiana during the great flood of 1927. Written on photo: "Portable Barber Shop, Melville, LA." M-84 Learn more »

The
Flood of 1927 was described by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover as
“the greatest peace-time calamity in the history of the country.” It inundated
16,570,627 acres (about 26,000 square miles) in 170 counties in seven states,
driving an estimated 931,159 people from their homes. The Mississippi River
remained at flood stage for a record 153 days. The flood caused more than
$400,000,000 in losses; 92,431 businesses were damaged and 162,017 homes
flooded. According to various estimates, there were between 250 and 500
flood-related deaths. In Louisiana alone, 10,000 square miles in 20 parishes
went underwater. The congressional response to the devastation, the 1928 Flood
Control Act, had far-reaching social, political, and physical consequences in
Louisiana and throughout the Mississippi River valley.

The
prelude to the flood began in August 1926, when rainstorms began to swell
streams in eastern Kansas, northwestern Iowa, and part of Illinois, all of
which fed into the Mississippi River. In December, heavy rains in Oklahoma,
Arkansas, and northern Louisiana filled the Arkansas and Red rivers. During
that fall, record rainfalls continued throughout the Mississippi River valley.
By the end of January, major tributaries such as the Ohio River were
overflowing their banks. In earlier
times, this would not have been the problem it was in 1927; the Mississippi
River and its tributaries once overflowed into natural drainage areas. But in
the late 1800s, the Mississippi River Commission adopted a “levees-only”
policy, which entailed the construction of levees that ran almost the full
length of the river. While these levees prevented flooding for a period, they
proved unable to withstand the floodwaters of 1927.

Threat
to New Orleans

Through
the early spring of 1927, the rains continued and the flood pushed downriver
toward Louisiana. New Orleans received 11.16 inches of rain in February—compared
to an average of 4.4 inches for the month—and steady rainfalls thereafter. Then,
on Good Friday, April 15, 1927, more than 14 inches of rain fell on New Orleans
in a single day, disabling the pumps that normally drained the city. The levees
were not breached; river water did not rush in. Instead, the levees held the
rainwater inside the city. That downpour also added more water to the
Mississippi River as it rushed past New Orleans. The levees there were under
pressure from both sides, and concerned citizens began to buy boats and
stockpile food. As heavy rains continued in the Mississippi River drainage area
above Louisiana, more than 20,000 men were put to work sandbagging levees
between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

The
threat continued to worsen, however, and state government officials believed
the levees would inevitably break. If the break happened below New Orleans, it
would relieve pressure and spare the city from massive flooding. An upstream
break, on the other hand, would send a disastrous flood into New Orleans.
Despite strenuous objections from people living downstream, Governor O. H.
Simpsonand his advisors acquiesced to a plea from New Orleans civic leaders to
blast a breach in the levee. This would give the flood a shortcut to the sea
and drop the river level at New Orleans, at the cost of flooding further south.
Engineers chose a westward loop in the river at Caernarvon and began blowing
the levee apart on April 29. Over the next ten days they used thirty-nine tons
of dynamite to open a channel that released 250,000 cubic feet of water per
second from the river.

For
two days before the dynamiting began the National Guard and major retailers
from New Orleans sent convoys of trucks to evacuate the 10,000 residents whose
homes and livelihoods would be washed away when the levee was breached. Most of
the refugees went to stay with relatives. Those who had no place to go were
brought to a warehouse in New Orleans. White people were housed on the fifth
floor, black people on the sixth. All had been promised full compensation for
their losses, but the lucky ones would get an average of only $274 each, and
thousands of them would get nothing.

Part
of that was because nobody realized how much would be washed away. The
financial leaders from New Orleans estimated that claims against a fund set up
to compensate the victims would be between $2 million and $6 million. Instead,
they amounted to $35 million, and there wasn’t enough money to go around. Additionally,
the fund had to bear the expense of feeding the refugees at a cost of $20,000 a
week. Refugees had to file a claim to receive compensation under a complicated
system that divided payments into various categories, provided that no partial
payments could be made, and without legal representation.

The
refugees were caught between a system of legalities they did not understand and
marshes still filled with water that kept them from going home. Most settled
for pennies on the dollar, and practically all of them remembered that it was a
man-made catastrophe that put them where they were. Adding to their anger, a
natural breach of the levees subsequently eased pressure on the New Orleans
levee; the blasting had been unnecessary. Though New Orleans had been spared,
other parts of southern Louisiana were still in trouble, particularly in the
Atchafalaya River and Bayou Teche basins to the west of the city.

Inundation
of Southern Louisiana

The
Atchafalaya River forks away from the Mississippi River at Simmesport in Avoyelles
Parish. Though it and its tributaries were lined by levees, they were filled to
overflowing, and part of the Mississippi River sought this shorter, straighter
course to the sea. Smaller levees had begun to break in northern and central
Louisiana in mid-May, but a disastrous break in the Atchafalaya River levee
came on May 17 at Melville in St. Landry Parish. River water poured through the
breach and began to rush to the south, soon joined by floodwaters caused by a
break in a Bayou des Glaises levee to the north of St. Landry, in Avoyelles
Parish.

The
two floods met just north of Port Barre in St. Landry Parish on May 18. They
combined to send an estimated 1.3 million cubic feet of water per second
roaring to the south. The flood inundated Arnaudville at the St. Landry-St. Martin
Parish line on May 19; Breaux Bridge and St. Martinville in St. Martin Parish
two days later; then New Iberia and Jeanerette in Iberia Parish; and Franklin
and Morgan City in St. Mary Parish. By the end of May, sixty thousand refugees were
either in southern Louisiana camps or receiving Red Cross aid elsewhere.
Thousands of cattle drowned and farm crops were wiped out as southern Louisiana
turned into a lake 200 miles long and 50 to 100 miles wide. It was not until
June that the floodwaters began to drain into the Gulf of Mexico

Once
again, housing had to be found for tens of thousands of refugees who had no
relatives to stay with. The Red Cross and local relief organizations set up
tent cities and makeshift housing in Marksville, Mansura, Baton Rouge,
Opelousas, Crowley, New Iberia, and elsewhere. Some twenty thousand people were
housed at Lafayette alone. Parishes set up “rehabilitation committees” to find
food and shelter for the displaced families.

When
the water finally subsided, the Red Cross provided seed, tools, and rations to
farm families facing the daunting task of surviving the winter and starting a
new crop in the spring. Some six hundred prefabricated cabins were sent to St.
Martin Parish and more like them elsewhere to temporarily replace destroyed
housing. At the end of August 1927, an anonymous Associated Press reporter
touring the Teche region was able to write, “Little farmhouses, bearing brown
watermarks at various heights according to the depth of the water reached, are
once more occupied, and some of the farmers are plowing in preparation for new
plantings. A few have crops already growing, and cane and corn are making a
brave attempt to put forth fruit despite the late start given them.”

Flood
Policy Revision

The
Flood of 1927 showed that levees alone would not solve the problem of flooding
on the Mississippi River and forced the federal government to reconsider its
flood control policy. As a result, huge tracts of lowland, called spillways,
were set aside in south central and southeastern Louisiana. Massive gates were
constructed to allow excess water to be diverted into these areas in times of
severe flooding. Whole communities, such as Bayou Chêne, built upon a ridge in
the Atchafalaya River basin, had to be abandoned because they were in the path
of the floodwaters that might be diverted.

The
flood drove many tenant farmers, most of whom were African American, off their
land and, in many cases, out of the region. They migrated by the thousands to
Chicago, Detroit, and other northern cities, changing the urban landscape in
those places. In addition, a stingy fiscal policy that offered little aid to
the flood victim, implemented under Republican President Calvin Coolidge, drove
many African Americans from the party of Lincoln into the Democratic party,
where they continue to be a considerable part of the constituency today.

SinceHurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans and the parishes to its south, there
have been inevitable comparisons between the two disasters. Each was caused
more or less by a man-made breach of a levee. Each caused widespread
dislocation of large numbers of people for many months. Each changed both the
physical and political face of t he region and played a role in national
affairs. Criticism over the handling of Katrina contributed in large measure to
the decision by Gov. Kathleen Blanco not to run for reelection in Baton Rouge,
and in lesser degree to a change of party in the White House in Washington. The
Flood of 1927 opened the door for the populist Huey Long to make his first
successful run for the governor’s mansion and played a substantial role in the
selection of his party’s candidate for the presidency. Both calamities caused
widespread dislocation of black people, the first adding to a migration to the
major urban cities of the North, the second to cities such as Houston and
Atlanta. Both caused disruptions of life in southern Louisiana for thousands of
people that arguably could be outranked only by the destruction caused during
the Civil War.

Cite This Entry

Chicago Manual of Style

Bradshaw, Jim. "Great Flood of 1927." In KnowLA Encyclopedia of Louisiana, edited by David Johnson. Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, 2010–. Article published May 13, 2011. http://www.knowla.org/entry/763/.

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